• System enhancements took effect starting as of January 26, 2013. 
• As each of you are aware, in order to enroll as an associate in any market where USANA does business an associate must provide their correct address in country to show residency and to allow us to contact them.  
• In addition, downline purchasing is strictly forbidden, meaning an associate must pay for his or her own orders. 
• These policies are difficult to enforce at times because an associate may “lend” the use of his or her address to downline members allowing enrollments that do not meet residency requirements.  Likewise, an upline may use the same credit card to pay for all orders in an organization, thus causing compensation plan manipulation.
• The compliance team has been charged with enforcing these rules but has found it difficult. 
• With project upgrade complete IT has been able to help this situation with two new enhancements. 
• First, as of January 26th the online enrollment system will not accept any address as a home address if that address has already been used by more than 15 other active associates.
• • Limited to main addresses only
  • however will not catch spelling or abreaviation differences
  • example: 123 Jon Boulevard vs. 123 Jon Blv.
  • The example would read as two different addressses
  • This will need to be evaluated and reported to compliance when noticed
  • This prohibition can be manually over-ruled by a DSR so that in the extremely rare circumstance that more than 15 associates truly do share the same address they simply need to enroll by phone. 
  • A DSR will then verify that the address is really their address and can complete the enrollment. 
• Second, as of January 26th our online product order system will not accept as payment for product any credit card that is already in use on more than 15 active distributorships.  
  • This rule will not apply for the time being in Mexico or the Philippines until we are comfortable that we have a working solution in those markets for distributors who do not have a credit card.  
  • In addition, this prohibition will not apply to an associate’s first order as it is common for a sponsor to lend his or her credit card to a new associate and take cash as payment for the first order. 
  • As with the first system enhancement, this prohibition can also be manually over-ruled by a DSR where the DSR speaks to the associate and the upline and verifies that the associate has paid cash to the upline and the upline authorizes use of the card. 
• Note that these enhancements do not represent a change in policy.  The policy remains that each associate must pay for his or her own orders and provide a legitimate address to enroll.  These enhancements simply will allow us to better enforce rules that were previously more difficult to enforce.  
• Kevin Guest and Deborah Woo informed each of the IDCs about this new enhancement in November and there were no complaints.   
• Brent Neidig will be writing a compliance corner article to remind associates of these policies. 
• In addition associates who have previously had a practice of signing many people up at one address or with one credit card will notice the restriction. 
• Please make sure you are prepared to respond to these associates and help them understand the restrictions and that your DSRs, compliance and field development staff understand as well.

Posted: 01/25/13
Updated: 01/29/13